Posts
Villa Mauresque par Floc'h & Rivière. Somerset Maugham et les siens : A Graphic Novel of W. Somerset Maugham's Life
Villa Mauresque par Floc'h & Rivière. Somerset Maugham et les siens (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2013)This post is about an extremely interesting new book, a graphic novel of W. Somerset Maugham's life, by Jean-Claude Floch and François Rivière, published in May 2013. It is in French and maybe it will be translated in English in the future (especially with the upcoming 140 years sort of anniversary of Maugham's birth), but I doubt whether the front cover would remain the same in the…
Penelope - W. Somerset Maugham
Penelope. A Comedy in Three Acts (London: Heinemann,1912)We are going to look at one of W. Somerset Maugham's plays, Penelope, and the first published edition in this post.
Maugham the Playwright: Penelope
I am not very familiar with Maugham's plays; I have read but one or two of his later plays long time ago without paying much attention.
Penelope, on the contrary, I find immensely entertaining. I read some contemporary reviews and it was very successful when it was first produced at …
The Maugham - Duff Letters - W. Somerset Maugham
Rothschild, Loren R., ed. The Letters of William Somerset Maugham to Lady Juliet Duff. California: Rasselas Press, 1982.This post will be about this extraordinary book, a collection of W. Somerset Maugham's letters to one of his correspondents ranging from 1935 to 1962.
Maugham's Letters
Nowadays, letter-writing is almost non-existent, with the invention of telephone and subsequently the email. It was not so during Maugham's lifetime, when the first thing that one habitually did t…
The Summing Up - W. Somerset Maugham
The Summing Up (London: Heinemann, 1938)This post is about W. Somerset Maugham's memoirs The Summing Up. I will record some of my reflections and describe the first edition that I possess.
The Summing Up of An Extraordinary Mind
The first time I read The Summing Up was some years ago. Upon closing the book this time, I experience very different feelings. Maugham has reiterated on different occasions that the most important aspect, or in fact, the sole significance, of an artwork (includin…
The Writer's Point of View - W. Somerset Maugham
The Writer's Point of View (London: The Cambridge University Press, 1951)This post is about a very short book in which W. Somerset Maugham talks about reading and writing.
The Writer's Point of View: Reading and Writing
I mentioned this pamphlet in a previous post. It contains the lecture delivered by Maugham for the National Book League at the Kingsway Hall on 24 October 1951.
As Maugham himself states at the beginning, by then (in his seventy-seventh year) he has said what he has …